Managed Discontents vs. Unimaginable Misery: On ‘A Line Made by Walking’

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To the right of the entrance to my house stands a distinctly ragged old tree. The tree hangs limply for two thirds of the year until it starts to stir around February. A brilliant golden bulb starts to peek out from under its previously harsh exterior and by the beginning of March, the tree is flecked with gold. It starts to shed this gold almost immediately, leaving the effect of a just missed confetti shower around my driveway.

In November 2015, I attended a reading from Jonathan Franzen in Dublin. Franzen was on something of a mammoth promotional tour for Purity — his fifth and possibly most polarizing novel. After the reading and a standard interview, the floor was opened up for questions. One attendee asked him to relay a story about him once pointing out a beautiful bird to the late David Foster Wallace. He was visibly irritated by the question and batted it away.

The snippet of a story about the bird comes from Franzen’s 2011 New Yorker essay “Farther Away,” in which he explores the impact Wallace’s death had on him while bird watching on a remote island off the coast of Chile. He sums up the difference between his own “manageable discontents” and Wallace’s “unimaginable misery:”

Once, when we were driving near Stinson Beach, in California, I’d stopped to give him a telescope view of a long-billed curlew, a species whose magnificence is to my mind self-evident and revelatory. He looked through the scope for two seconds before turning away with patent boredom. “Yeah,” he said with his particular tone of hollow politeness, “it’s pretty.”

The objects and passions which sustain us are not the immediate subject of Sara Baume’sA Line Made By Walking. It begins with an explanation of how narrator Frankie’s grandmother died. A passing in the night, notable for the storm that uprooted a nearby tree. Frankie takes a branch of this tree and says she loves it for marking her grandmother’s death.

She goes to live in her grandmother’s house and begins a project of photographing dead animals. She establishes some rules for this project: she must not be involved in their death in any way and she cannot photograph any creature that is merely wounded. The novel is marked by her photos of these creatures — a badger, a rabbit, a rat, a robin — and they become her documentation of a world that is dying around her.

Early during her stay, Frankie comes across a number of “weird” trinkets that her mother has deemed to be sufficiently important to save from a clear out. She wonders what it is about these nondescript items that moved her mother to make such a decision. Why a small Eiffel Tower or a “wobble legged beetle in a nutshell” was worthy of keeping. Were they infused with her grandmothers gaze she asks? Was it because they kept her company during her final weeks? That they may have some sentimental value — some cliched idea of worth because of circumstance — never occurs to her.

Aside from her photographs of dead animals, the novel is punctuated by the narrator testing herself on all manner of art projects. “Works about running, I test myself;” “Works about bed, I test myself;” “Works about flowers, I test myself;” — in every instance Frankie displays almost total recall of the detail behind a particular art project and her interpretation of it. We are left with the impression of someone who believes they have failed at art and needs to test themselves in order to keep some idea of a passion alive. There is a regret about art here — that it could not sustain her. It could not facilitate her manageable discontents.

The fingerprints and shadow of Frankie’s grandmother stalk the house, from the smell of her now dead dog to the creaks and murmurs of a house in disrepair, its loyalties still lie with its old occupant and Frankie is drawn to this. She is drawn to living in someone else’s world, of sustaining someone else’s life.

Throughout the novel, Frankie remembers various episodes from her childhood. One such episode details a wheelchair bound friend in school who suffers a fall. She wails and screams and continues even when she has been picked up. Frankie equates this screaming with the girl’s realization of all of the “cumulative indignity of every compromised school day gone by and yet to come, by the weeks after weeks after weeks of unspeakable unfairness which would not stop, not ever.” The girl’s façade of strength evaporates and we are led into her horror — for Frankie, the scream is never about one incident, it’s about all of the incidents to come. All of the dead things that will lie around her.

A Line Made by Walking has the unusual quality of documenting Frankie’s descent into depression and yet celebrating aspects of life taken for granted. By its end, Frankie is continuing her journey and cannot offer us any real kind of resolution, she is just going to keep moving. She is going to keep testing herself and hope things will get better.

Frankie’s tale reminds us that that gold confetti falls everywhere, we just need to see it and not merely look at it. But the book’s great power is helping us to better understand those who can only look. It helps us understand the difference between managed discontents and unimaginable misery.

The world stubbornly failed to end on Friday – again. This must have come as a disappointment to the followers of Rev. Harold Camping, who have spent the last five months waiting for God to whisk them off to Heaven, leaving the rest of us to endure earthquakes, fires, and the eventual violent destruction of the planet. Camping, a 90-year-old radio preacher, first predicted this “rapture” would occur on May 21, but when May 22 dawned and he and the rest of his morally radiant flock were still among us, he said he’d miscalculated and that the rapture would take place on October 21, the same day that God destroyed the world. And, well, here we all are.

If Camping wants to revise his end-times prediction again, he’ll have to get in line. Last month, Tom Perrotta, usually a purveyor of relatively cheery tales of suburban angst, published The Leftovers, set in the gloomy aftermath of a rapture-like event. At the cineplex, moviegoers have been subjected to Steven Soderbergh’sContagion, starring Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow, which tracks the spread of a global pandemic that threatens the human race. And now, Colson Whitehead, hipster laureate of Brooklyn, has come out with Zone One, a post-apocalyptic horror tale about a mysterious plague that has turned billions of people into mindless zombies programmed to eat the flesh of the few uninfected survivors.

You can tell a lot about a society from its doomsday scenarios. Fifty or sixty years ago, at the height of the Cold War, popular culture was awash in paranoid thrillers like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in which evil aliens from outer space (read: Commie bastards) infiltrate the hearts and minds of good Americans. Some decades later, after the fall of the Red Menace, we began to fear our own power over the natural world and we got such Icarus tales as Waterworld, the Kevin Costner kitschfest in which global warming has sunk all the world’s land mass, and Michael Crichton’sJurassic Park, in which an amusement park full of cloned dinosaurs threatens to get out of control.

Today, in the wake of humbling military stalemates in Iraq and Afghanistan and the even more humbling 2008 financial crisis, one might expect to see more parables on the destructiveness of our overweening ambitions, but that would require a societal sense of ambition. Instead, as people so often do when their own ambitions get the best of them, we feel victimized. In Zuccotti Park, the unemployed blame the bankers. On Wall Street, the bankers blame the government. In Washington, politicians blame other politicians. Everyone is running around pointing fingers, claiming the other guy got us into this fix, but deep down, beneath the slick lobbying campaigns and handmade cardboard signs, I think we all have the disheartening sense that we have been judged and found wanting.

That’s the common thread of these contemporary doomsday scenarios. In the case of Rev. Camping’s predicted rapture, the Judgment Day comes straight from the Book of Revelations, which Camping claimed, citing his own wacky mathematical calculations, predicted the Second Coming of Christ on May 21, 2011. But Americans, despite what they may tell pollsters, are skeptical of an overly literal reading of the Bible and prefer their morality tales to take a secular form. Thus, Perrotta’s The Leftovers simply removes God from the story, positing a mysterious, possibly “random harvest” that has culled hundreds of millions of people from the earth, among them “Hindus and Buddhists and Muslims and Jews and atheists and animists and homosexuals and Eskimos and Mormons and Zoroastrians.”

Contagion and Zone One, on the other hand, rely on the metaphor of the plague. The makers of Contagion went to great lengths to make their plague “realistic,” consulting epidemiologists to get the “facts” of the highly infectious virus at the center of the film right, while Whitehead appears to have restricted his research for Zone One to obsessive viewings of zombie flicks like Night of the Living Dead. But whether your guiding authorities are prominent scientists or directors of schlocko cult classics, a metaphor is a metaphor, and in these stories, as in the original Vietnam-era Living Dead movies, the underlying message seems to be that there is something very destructive in our culture…and it’s spreading.

Whitehead goes to some trouble to disabuse his reader of the notion that there might be any greater meaning to his macabre tale. Midway through, the hero, who goes by the nickname Mark Spitz, sarcastically recounts the ravings of “the divine-retribution folks” he’s met during his time on the run:
The human race deserved the plague, we brought it on ourselves for poisoning the planet, for the Death of God, the calculated brutalities of the global economic system, for driving primordial species to extinction: the entire collapse of values as evidenced by everything from nuclear fission to reality television to alternate side of the street parking. Mark Spitz could only endure these harangues for a minute or two before he split. It was boring. The plague was the plague. You were wearing galoshes, or you weren’t.
The author doth protest too much, methinks. How else are we supposed to read a tale set in a warzone-like sliver of the Southern tip of Manhattan, minutes from the fallen Twin Towers, in which mindless zombies, infected by a virus that turns ordinary people into flesh-eating monsters, attack one of the last bastions of civilized society?

Still, if we ignore Whitehead’s diffident demurrals and assume the book is a parable, the question remains: a parable of what? The post-apocalyptic Manhattan Whitehead describes is indeed a fallen world. In the flashback-style digressions that fill much of the book, we learn that one night, while Mark Spitz was gambling in Atlantic City with a buddy, the world was engulfed by an as-yet unexplained plague that causes its sufferers to take bites out of the uninfected, thus spreading the virus. When the book begins, the spread of the plague has stalled, and a rump government of the uninfected, based in Buffalo, New York, has launched a campaign to retake Manhattan, starting at the bottom of the island in the so-called Zone One. To accomplish the mission, Mark Spitz and his fellow survivors must eliminate the remaining zombies, who are broken into two camps: the “skels,” who wander the earth in search of human flesh, and the mysterious “stragglers,” who are infected but harmless and seem to haunt places that have emotional meaning for them.

Just as political philosophers dating back to Plato have created utopian worlds ruled by people just like themselves, creators of post-apocalyptic worlds always seem to spare those who are most like them. So, who then is Mark Spitz? He is a black man, though as is the case for Whitehead himself, this fact doesn’t define him (or even get mentioned) for most of the novel. Before the plague struck, he was an ordinary twenty-something living with his parents in the Long Island suburbs and commuting into Manhattan to work “in Customer Relationship Management, New Media Department,” for a large coffee-making conglomerate:
He dispatched bots into the electronic ether, where they mingled among the various global sites and individual feeds, and when the bots returned with a hit or blip, he sent a message: “Thanks for coming, glad you liked the joe!” or “Next time try the Mocha Burst, you’ll thank me later.”
Mark Spitz, then, is a specialist in the ersatz, a technician of corporate-sponsored caring. This expertise, if that’s the word for it, seems of a piece with his personality, which is marked by a gift for the half-hearted effort. “He staked out the B or the B chose him: it was his native land,” Whitehead writes of his hero early on, adding: “His aptitude lay in the well-executed muddle, never shining, never flunking, but gathering himself for what it took to progress past life’s next random obstacle.”

Thus, in a world filled with miserable “stragglers” haunting their most emotionally resonant corners of the earth, Mark Spitz is the last slacker, saved from death by an unerring talent for never really giving a shit. Indeed, when read this way, the book can be seen as a series of incidents in which Mark Spitz tries to work up a genuine emotion about someone or something and is thwarted either by flesh-hungry zombies or his own tepid emotional temperature.

I wish, then, that Whitehead’s book had made me care about something, whether it was solitary, loveless Mark Spitz, or the lost world of pre-apocalypse Manhattan, or even zombies. But the truth is it didn’t. Colson Whitehead is gifted with one of the surest prose styles in American letters, but he is, like his hero in this book, a bit too cool for his own damn good. His last book, Sag Harbor, set in the world of wealthy “black boys with beach houses,” touched for a single chapter upon the bitter rage that can come with being black and successful in this country, and then, as if it had veered too close to a consuming flame, retreated into good-natured tales of summertime high-jinks among Long Island’s moneyed resort dwellers.

The last fifty pages of Zone One all but turn themselves, but the rest of the novel – which is to say its first 200 pages – are one long slog through endless digressions and flashbacks within flashbacks. If there were a PowerPoint presentation called “Do’s and Don’ts of Writing Novels,” this rule, “The Story Must Always Move Forward,” would appear on the second slide, right after “Show, Don’t Tell.” Whitehead is too talented and too experienced a writer not to grasp this basic idea, so I’m left with the troubling sense that, as with his last book, Whitehead, the walking embodiment of Brooklyn literary cool, smelled the danger in his premise and pulled back.

When writers marry other writers, the union can prove to be painfully inequitable. One career often soars above the other, sometimes in a permanent fashion, with the spouse dwelling seemingly in the shadows. Nick Laird, despite his achievements as a prize-winning poet, is probably primarily recognizable to the public as the husband of Zadie Smith. Likewise, Raymond Carver’s widow, Tess Gallagher, is an accomplished but unheralded poet herself. Not since Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, one could argue, has there been a writer-couple of parallel impact, a husband and wife duo making contributions of equal standing to literary history.

It was revealed last year that global phenomenon Elena Ferrante was married to another writer, Domenico Starnone, a name known primarily in Italian literary circles. Ferrante, of course, has achieved deserved renown in America and worldwide for her astounding Neapolitan tetralogy. As of now, Starnone, winner of one of Europe’s most prestigious literary awards, the Premio Strega, remains read and lauded mainly in his native Italy and parts of Europe. Yet if his brilliant new novel Ties (Europa Editions; translation by Jhumpa Lahiri) — only his second to be translated into English — is any indication, Starnone’s international reputation abroad may be due for a bump of its own.

Starnone’s engrossing and masterful story of the Minori family, told from a trifecta of perspectives — the betrayed wife’s letters in the opening section, the doddering husband’s viewpoint in the middle, the closing section recounted by the downtrodden adult daughter — is almost too impeccable a work. Shaped and polished as meticulously as an Etruscan urn, no portion, no narrative ligament, no single word feels out of place. Starnone wastes no time gathering narrative steam but, almost before the first word is sounded, pitches the reader directly into the chaotic epicenter of a damaged couple’s erotic drama and then, in a way only geniuses can do, guides the tale grippingly toward a conclusion that has that rare combination of qualities: stupendous unpredictability alongside perfect inevitability. “All great art is inevitable,” goes the (probably apocryphal, but no less true) Leonard Bernstein aphorism. One lays down Starnone’s novel in the end almost exhausted at what the form can still do to us.

The basic story itself is familiar. A man, Aldo Minori, betrays his wife, Vanda, and the resulting emotional devastation wrought upon the family, including their children, Anna and Sandro, turns out to be of far greater magnitude and implication than could have been predicted. Aldo’s world, inner and outer, becomes vulnerable to the savages of grief, fury, and revenge. For decades he tries to contain the damage, repress his past, but is thwarted by his own bungling aloofness and flawed memory. Using the simple conceit of infidelity and the protagonist’s futile attempts to transcend the past, Starnone manages to capture a glimpse of a human emotional universe much larger, far grander, and more intimidatingly incomprehensible than one could have imagined. Then as the simple machinery of the Naples-based drama churns, as Aldo Minori’s nose is forced into the filth of his past, a theme emerges that transcends the novel’s overlapping sub-themes of desire, escape, betrayal, family, discontent, chaos, time, and the myth of Pandora’s box — it’s the idea of the nature of the human soul.

What, if anything, does the soul contain? The familiar Delphic maxim “know thyself” comes to mind — but can we really know ourselves, our souls? What is it that can or should be known? Why does Aldo, an ostensibly ordinary or even decent man, behave the way he does, why does anyone? During my reading of Starnone, I happened to come across another piece of wisdom, a fragment by Heraclitus that seemed more to the point. Heraclitus wrote: “You will not find out the boundaries of the soul, even by traveling along every path: so deep a measure does it have.” Here, the soul is not knowable at all, not inwardly containable, but just the opposite, it casts us outward, conceiving of the spirit as an infinite shadow-complex in which the person travels upon endless roads, drifting in a permanent state of displacement. Heraclitus’s forte was the metaphysics of inconstancy — chaos, change, transformation, contradiction, the ceaseless disorder of the human spirit — and it’s the idea of chaos itself, the eruption of dissonances between action and reaction, around which Starnone’s novel coheres.

In the visual center of the novel, as Aldo Minori picks through documents containing his life’s work that had been scattered around the apartment after a mysterious act of vandalism in his home, the writer says of himself:

Was I that stuff?…A concrete accumulation, through decades, of papers, hand-written, printed, a trail of scrawls, reports, pages, newspapers, floppy discs, USB fobs, hard disks, the cloud? My potential realized, Myself made real: that is to say, a chaos that could overflow, if I just typed Aldo Minori, from the living room to the Google archives?

The examination of his own writing seems to show that all that work the aging artist did throughout his life was, itself, a regime of containment, a futile attempt to make knowable an unpredictable soul, an unwinnable struggle to which, as it happens, no less are his daughter and wife later fated.

As are we, perhaps. What’s instantly noticeable about the book is the extent to which Ties is in conversation with Elena Ferrante’s early novel The Days of Abandonment. Both stories take place in Naples; both books are the same manageable read-in-one-sitting length. In both, a woman and her children are abandoned for no apparent reason by a man of good standing. Only, in Ferrante, we strictly follow Olga, the embittered wife, whereas in Domenico Starnone we cling largely but not only to betrayer Aldo Minori’s viewpoint and then to the perspectives of his wife and daughter. This is entirely appropriate, given that the central ideas in either book are essentially at odds. Ferrante turns us inward, forcing Olga to attempt to “know thyself,” an effort that, after a string of gut-wrenching domestic horrors, delivers her to her own body, her Self, her striving to know what lay within. Starnone does the perfect opposite, forces Aldo outward, revealing the soul’s ongoing volcanic eruption, the eternal outflow of indecipherable Everything, of which he is fated to learn nothing at all.

It’s an interesting thought to imagine Ferrante and Starnone in dinnertime back-and-forths over the issue. Elena shouting “Within, within!” while Starnone barks back “Without, without!” The eternal question is never really laid to rest, can never quite leave them be, even after the publication of two brilliant novels on the topic. They are fated — perhaps as all married couples are fated — to engage in an unwinnable battle in which both are right, yet both wrong, and for which a satisfactory conclusion can neither rightly be drawn nor, perhaps, should be.

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“Once, when we were driving near Stinson Beach, in California, I’d stopped to give him a telescope view of a long-billed curlew, a species whose magnificence is to my mind self-evident and revelatory. He looked through the scope for two seconds before turning away with patent boredom. “Yeah,” he said with his particular tone of hollow politeness, “it’s pretty.”

This is less illustrative of “manageable discontents” vs “unimaginable misery” than it is of the snubbing of a midddlebrow sensibility and that middlebrow sensibility misinterpreting the snub as a (corny) parable. (Corny) parables being rather thick on the ground these days, since YA (however it wants to call itself) became the dominant commercial form of Lit.